To see what the Japanese people are watching on TV, you can go to ustream.tv for the live streaming of their public TV network, NHK. Also, here is a page with a collection of videos (scroll to the bottom of the page). But naturally, they are going to be sensitive to the feelings of the Japanese people so as not to cause any panic, which means their reporting will be rather conservative. For instance, they did not broadcast the popular video footage of the explosion of the nuclear reactor building (at least for a long time).

If you just want to follow the critical news, I think this page on Kyodo News is useful. It just shows you the latest and the most urgent news headlines.

Naturally, Twitter is useful for getting a sense of what people are talking about. Apparently the Japanese people at the disaster sites used Twitter to report the locations of the fire.

If you can read Japanese, this page on Google is useful in getting a sense of what the Japanese people are talking about. (The English version of the same thing.)

Blogs I like: New York Times, Aljazeera, Guardian, and Wall Street Journal.

And, one of the best explanations of what’s happening to the nuclear reactors by Dr. Josef Oehmen, a research scientist at MIT.

Readings of radiation levels from different prefectures.

Among all the sensational articles, this one gives you a small dose of relief.

This is pretty sad and funny. But given that over-achieving Asians are a dime a dozen, he would probably have a better chance of becoming famous.

When I first came to this country in the 80s, the Americans saw themselves as the originators of all the great ideas, and Japan as a country that took (or even stole) their ideas and executed them well (or better). Back then, this view of the two countries was meant to paint America as being superior to Japan. The latter was merely a “copy cat”. In other words, in the 80s, “idea” was clearly superior to “execution”. Now, things are changing. A lot of people are catching on to the fact that ideas are “a dime a dozen”, and that “execution is all that matters”. Some are arguing that you cannot separate ideas from execution as each would become meaningless on their own. Either way, execution is clearly getting a lot more respect these days than it used to. And, ironically, this comes after America has lost most of its abilities to make things.

I’m not exactly sure why this shift in sentiment is happening but I believe it started after the Dotcom bust. Many “great” ideas never saw the light of day, and everyone realized the limitations of “great ideas”. Not just that, the Internet made it very easy to search and find the same or similar ideas that other people came up with. If you have a “great idea”, you just have to Google it, and chances are, someone else has already beat you to it. This was particularly true when iPhone’s App Store opened. Everyone had “great ideas”. I had an idea of writing a game where you pop a bubble wrap. I figured this was a weird enough idea that nobody else would think of it, but sure enough, someone had already done it. No matter how many ideas I came up with, there was always someone else with the same idea. The speed and the efficiency by which we can find others with the same idea made us realize how ubiquitous “great ideas” are. I believe this is why “execution” is where the emphasis is today.

This is a timely film; just so that the world doesn’t think the Japanese people just hate dolphins. (They don’t; they just don’t think the lives of dolphins are more important than those of other living things.) From the press release:

ʻTogether: Dancing with Spinner Dolphinsʼ (3 min 33 sec), depicting the tender dance between NY choreographer/filmmaker Chisa Hidaka and wild dolphins premieres on November 6th, 2010 at two Film Festivals: the Big Apple Film Festival at Tribeca Cinemas in NYC and the Colorado Environmental Film Festival in Golden, Colorado. The film can also be downloaded at http://dolphin-dance.org/together

The first problem of racism is that many people don’t actually understand what racism is and how it works. They think that if they denounce “racism”, they are not racist. Case in point: The latest controversy from the singer Morrissey where he described the Chinese people as a “subspecies” because of the way they treat animals. In response to the outrage, he says, “I abhor racism and oppression or cruelty of any kind and will not let this pass without being absolutely clear and emphatic … Racism is beyond common sense and has no place in our society.” I’m not sure how these two statements reconcile one another in his head.

We are all racist. Denying it makes the problem worse because we stop questioning our own prejudice, and prejudice is something that creeps out when we least expect it. People like Morrissey don’t think about what racism actually means because they have ruled themselves out of the possibility of being racist. People who are the least self-critical are the most likely to be prejudiced.

What is interesting about Morrissey’s response is that he denounces racism because it’s “beyond common sense,” which would mean that anything beyond common sense has “no place in our society.” He is one of those people I call “common sense” Nazis who believe that they are the masters of “common sense” and that anyone who deviates from their ideas of “common sense” are simply wrong. “Common sense” is their sacred cow and is unquestionable and transcendental. If you ask them to define what “common sense” is, they’ll roll their eyes on you. It’s a form of fundamentalism and supremacism where superiority is defined without reason. If anyone is a subspecies, it’s the people like Morrissey who never seem to have evolved since the times of blatant racial injustice and ignorance. Sure, there are many of these “subspecies” in China too, but obviously there are still plenty of them in England also.

Update (9/8/10):

A commentator on a different post raised the question of why this is racism but not my own criticisms of Japan and other nations. Good question, so I’d like to clarify.

There is nothing wrong with criticizing a culture or a nation; it’s policies, customs, philosophies, etc.. As a matter of fact, in countries with long histories, sometimes it is very hard to reverse certain traditions that almost everyone actually dislikes because they carry a certain momentum. So, criticism of such traditions can be quite positive for these cultures also.

There is nothing wrong with criticizing certain aspects of the Chinese culture, like human and animal rights. Morrissey is certainly entitled to have his opinions and criticisms of the Chinese culture. And, I think the Chinese can also benefit from constructive discussions on those issues. However, Morrissey suggested that their behavior stems from their biology. Such argument has no basis in reason and is not constructive in any sense of the word. It’s a pure insult. This is how the white people justified black slavery; they considered blacks as biologically inferior to them, an inferior species of human race. Whites in fact thought that about Asians and all other races too. It was a perfectly acceptable idea at the time. This is why all sorts of racial injustice took place. Morrissey’s way of attributing the cause of a certain behavior to biology comes from that ugly tradition. That’s racism pure and simple.

According to this poll by Reuters, the Japanese use only 33 percent of the vacation days they are given. This is pretty stupid. According to Jim Loehr, a “performance psychologist”, what distinguishes the best athletes from the rest is not how hard they work or play but how well they rest. The Japanese being a hardworking people is a myth. Now many Americans who have worked with the Japanese know that they are just very good at looking like they are working hard. Not taking much vacation days is a good example of keeping up this façade.